


Hold Her Head High

by TwixforBats



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Gen, baby Maeby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-21 02:18:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwixforBats/pseuds/TwixforBats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She might not know how to hold her baby but at the very, very least, Lindsay can always trust herself to be a better mother than Lucille.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold Her Head High

Lindsay smiles happily when she sees Gob in the kitchen, lazily flicking cards on the table. “Guess who's here!” she says excitedly, shaking the baby buggy just enough for Maeby to stir slightly.

Gob's expression goes from bored to polite smile when he sees the baby, rising from his chair as he does a weird movement with his left hand that makes the cards disappear. “Lindsay!” he exclaims, taking a couple of steps towards her as he tries to decide whether to look at the baby or at his sister. “How good to see you! Is this my little niece then?”

She puffs her chest out in pride, evidently prevented from clapping her hands only because she's too busy holding the baby carriage. “Maeby!”

There's something that looks like confusion flashing behind Gob's flat smile, him staring at her for a couple of seconds as if waiting for her words to change their meaning into something sensible. “What,” he asks in the end, the smile dropping slightly, “there was some confusion at the airport and you might have taken a Mexican baby or something?”

“It's her name!” Lindsay scoffs at that, apparently finding the fact that she has to explain it ridiculous, but instantly forgets it in favor of shaking the baby carriage a little more. “Look at her,” she coos, her fingertips brushing Maeby's cheek lightly, “isn't she the prettiest baby you've ever seen?”

Gob looks at his niece, now sucking her little fist with half closed eyes, her head freakishly huge over a body completely hidden by the little cloud of lace that's her dress, only her incredibly short, chubby arms showing. “Yeah!” He says, trying to focus on keeping up his smile so that his voice won't get high pitched enough to sound fake, “she looks healthy!” Gob looks at the baby again, trying to find something that can pass for a compliment: he doesn't. “She looks just like you!” he cheerfully lies, mostly assuming that Lindsay works like Michael and Tracy and remembering only too late that she doesn't. “I mean, she's a bit chubbier than you. Of course.”

“What?” Lindsay widens her eyes, quickly taking the baby in her arms to either hold her or weigh her- Gob kind of suspects it's the latter. “She's not too fat, right? I don't want mother to-”

“She's fine, Linds,” he says quickly, his smile stretching a bit too much, “it's baby fat, it's cute, she's lovely!”

“She is, right?” She does a small smile, looking at Maeby as she starts to stir in her arms, then looks back at Gob. “But you're sure she's not fat, right? I don't want mother to think that I'm fattening her or-”

Lindsay is apparently too distressed to notice that Maeby is wriggling in her arms: Gob, however, does. He tries to get his sister to pause by waving his hands slightly, attempting a timid “Lindsay, the baby” that goes completely unnoticed.

“Oh god, she isn't too small, right? She'd just say that I'm eating all her food.”

“Linds,” he tries again, taking a couple of steps forward while gesturing to the baby that's getting more and more agitated, “you're holding her wrong.”

“She's perfectly healthy,” she says, completely oblivious to both the fact that Gob is now right in front of her and that her daughter is actively trying to escape from her arms now. “And there's nothing she can-”

It's the small whimpers that Maeby starts making that force Gob to snatch the baby from his sister's arms, an exasperated “you're holding her _wrong_ ” as he cradles his niece in his arms: Lindsay lets out a surprised little cry but stops herself from launching forwards, frozen in mid-leap as she realizes that her daughter is actually quite content in her uncle's arms.

“How do you do _that_?” she asks, trying to figure out the difference between what Gob is doing and what Lindsay usually does: she had pretty much accepted the fact that Maeby just didn't like it when Lindsay held her and so she had rationalized that she was one of those babies that didn't really like affection (she didn't seem to mind when Tobias held her, but that's probably because girls prefer their fathers, right?).  
Now, however, Maeby is calm and normal even though Gob is patting her back and- just _why_?

Gob rolls his eyes before he gives her his best condescending smile. “Who do you think had to hold Buster when mom accused the maid of trying to kidnap and sell one of us for cheap booze?”

He says that like she's a complete idiot for not having thought of it, evidently just barely restraining himself from going 'me, duh' but not managing to wipe the smug smile off of his face: luckily enough Lindsay is used to that, so she just rolls her eyes. “I mean, what are you doing, why is she not... squirming around.”

“Oh.” He raises his left elbow slightly, just enough to show Lindsay the way Maeby's head is leaning on the crook of his bent arm. “You have to hold up her head.”

Lindsay frowns, a corner of her mouth twitching in disgust as she remember that one time she accidentally touched her baby's head and found it to be soft. “I didn't know you liked children!” she chirps then, desperately trying to change the subject so that she'll stop shuddering at the frightening memory.

“I don't!” Gob answers with equal cheerfulness, a big grin on his face that looks positively beaming. “I get that they're cute, but at this age they're so _boring-_ they can't even roll, can you believe it? You ask them to pick a card and they don't react, you try to use them for an illusion and they start screaming the moment you put them in the box... they just stand there and stare. _Boring_.”

Lindsay opens her mouth to argue – her baby is not boring and how dare he even suggest anything like that, really – but forgets whatever she was going to say the moment she hears the front door opening, a quiet pause followed by a “Gob, is that you?” that's more of a sigh than a question.

“Gimme back my baby,” she hisses as she snatches Maeby back from Gob's arms, the baby squirming the moment Lindsay tries to cradle her, “ _she's mine to show off_.”

Gob frowns but he only manages a muttered “you have to-” before he finds himself screaming “ta-dah!” with Lindsay as Michael steps in the kitchen.

“Look at my baby!” she exclaims excitedly, trying her best to look like a radiant mother with her radiant daughter in spite of the fact that her baby was apparently trying her best to escape from her grip.

Michael doesn't seem to realize that, though, so busy he is suddenly lighting up. “Oh,” he coos, the biggest smile ever plastered on his face as he teleports next to Lindsay, “isn't she beautiful!”

Lindsay and Gob grin at each other as Michael leans over the baby, exchanging a triumphant look that is, for all intent and purposes, basically the quiet version of a high-five on the notes of 'The Final Countdown' as a flock of white doves fly all around them in grand celebration: it's a great victory, and the fact that Maeby is still wriggling in her arms does not make it any less so.

“She looks a bit- can I?” Michael only waits for Lindsay to open her mouth before taking Maeby in his arms, holding her in that magical way that makes her instantly quiet down. “Aw, Lindsay, she's adorable! It's a shame that they're cousins, she and my George Michael would make such a cute couple, eh?”

Gob rolls his eyes but Lindsay manages to ignore him, mostly because she's too busy trying to keep up her winning smile as she looks at Michael effortlessly holding her baby like it's the most normal thing in the world. “Look at you, so good at holding babies,” she says, desperately trying to keep the self-consciousness out of her happy bubble, “where did you learn?”

Michael barely looks at her, he's far too busy smiling at Maeby. “Don't worry, Lindsay, you learn how to do it after a while. Babies want to feel stable: you hold up their heads and the rest comes on its own.”

Lindsay frowns as she notices that her meaning of “ _the rest comes on its own_ ” is apparently different from that of her brother, but before she can actually ask them to stop lying and tell her the truth she hears the front door opening again.

“Hey brother?”

The timid voice is enough to make Lindsay smile again: she can believe that Gob and Michael are good with babies, but Buster is not a better parent than her. He just isn't. “Buster!” she exclaims, cheerful again, “guess who just came back from Boston?”

It takes a couple of second for Buster to show himself: a real Milford man, he peers quietly from the door before showing himself to his siblings, but when he does he's got a beaming smile. “Hey sister!” he says, stretching slightly his hands towards Lindsay's shoulders before Maeby steals his attention: he stares at her for a bit, blinking slowly in surprise, then turns to Lindsay with a somehow even bigger smile than before.

“Is she your daughter?” he asks, excitedly. “She's a cutie!”

Lindsay nods, happily ignoring the way Gob rolls his eyes again: Buster almost claps his hands at that, then turns to Maeby. “Hey baby niece?” he asks, giggling a bit as he stretches his arms and gently rubs the baby's hands.

Maeby laughs at that. She _laughs_.  
Lindsay has to pull her face in impossible ways to make her smile and Buster just _makes her laugh_.

“Give me back my baby now, _I'm leaving_!”


End file.
